What made for an exciting race to follow, made for less predictable results and higher-than-usual point totals for all us prognosticators. If you blew it, you’re in good company! Only 208 folks tallied 50 or fewer points, easily the lowest such total since 107 in 2011, when there were only 337 entrants compared 1,117 fully scoring entrants this year.

The Winners
Thank you again to Drymax, Altra, Gu Energy, and Julbo, along with artist Maggie Tides for providing the great prizes for the contest. Without them, the only thing to come out of the contest would be bragging rights. On to the winners!

Kristin Zosel’s (24 points), a gear reviewer and transcriptionist here at iRunFar, path to victory was paved with the lowest score on the women’s side (6 points), where she correctly predicted Magdalena Boulet to finish second and Fiona Hayvice to finish fifth. She was one place off in picking Nicole Kalogeropoulos seventh (finished sixth) and Meghan Laws eighth (finished ninth) along with four points for picking Andrea Huser sixth (finished 10th). On the men’s side, she got one point each for picking Jeff Browning third (finished fourth) and Jesse Haynes seventh (finished eighth). She got two points for picking Ian Sharman fifth (finished seventh), five points for picking Tòfol Castanyer sixth (finished 11th), and nine points for picking Elov Olsson fourth (finished 13th). Kristin wins six pairs of Drymax socks, a pair of Altra shoes, a great selection of energy products from GU, a pair of Julbo sunglasses, and a sweet Western States triptych from Maggie Tides.

The Overall Contest Field
For the second year in a row, we’ve had a significant drop in the number of folks with 50 or fewer points with only 208 making it this year… so don’t feel bad if you had a rough go of it in 2017!

[A note to email subscribers only: If you can’t see these results, you need to click on the article title in your email to view the article in a web browser.]

Men’s PredictionsAfter bumping up from two to eight points last year, the men’s winner is back down to two points. Kristin Simonson correctly picked Chris DeNucci in fifth, Ian Sharman in seventh, and Jesse Haynes in eighth. Her only points come from picking Ryan Sandes one place too low (second) and Jeff Browning one place too high (third). Kristin, leave us a comment below so we can hook you up with something from iRunFar.

Final Words
Thanks to the 1,117 individuals who fully took part in the contest… more than triple the total number of starters (369) in this year’s Western States! We had a lot of fun bringing it to you and hope you had a lot of fun participating. We’ll bring you more fun contests in the future.

Whoa!!! Amazing!!! Thank you very much!!! Nerding out on ultras for 20 years has a few perks. :) Apologies to Cat Bradley and Ryan Sandes for not picking them FTW. Thanks to each sponsor–Drymax, Gu, Altra, and Julbo–and the amazing artist, Maggie Tides!!

Hi Kyle,
I’d meant to place the N/A under the Open Women (now corrected), as you picked Magdalena Boulet twice and the rules only allow picking someone once in the open category. Aside from the “dumb mistake,” you did really well! :-) (Giving you the worse of the two Magda picks, I think you totaled 29 points, which would have been good enough to tie for fourth.)